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Felix's Tomb |
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Felix's Tomb |
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I had a dream. In my dream I was in a place very
much like the Smith's house in the mid-1980s, and Felix had died. In real life Felix had died years before I had this dream. I had known him for several years. He was about knee-high, a mixed breed, with traces of Alaskan husky in his features, but none in his gentle temperament. He was old when I knew him and didn't do much more than move from one lying down spot to another, never far from the house. He'd wag his tail a little if you showed interest in him, and every now and then someone would pass by and say, "Hey, Felix" or maybe pause and scratch his ears for a moment. But Felix was undemanding, and for the most part, no one paid him much attention. He was a fixture, like a bush or pickup truck or a pile of firewood. He was just there, too old to be a real watchdog any longer, and probably too confused by the eccentric comings and goings of the many Smith house tenants and visitors to have any clue who should be barked at anyway. He had long since switched off whatever watchdog reflexes he had. His attitude was more or less, "I can't keep up with this rabble; wake me up if you need me." I was a tenant at the Smith's house in the mid-80s, and I remember when Felix died. He quit eating and didn't move around much. Then he would hardly drink water. Eric petted him and tried to perk him up and get him to take some nourishment, but he wasn't interested. He declined steadily, but hung on for days. I came in from work for several days in a row looking around and wondering if I would find Felix still alive. His eyes were glazed but he was breathing. His lying down spot would change between evening and morning, so he evidently had the strength, somehow, to stand up and walk a few steps. There was no point in taking him to a vet; he was far too old for that. Then one day Felix was gone. Eric looked for him in the woods behind the house, and I did some searching myself, but we never found Felix's body. My theory is that he struggled to his feet to change positions and somehow realized that when he went down again it would be for the last time, so he decided in some compartment way back in his tired little brain, "Go down I will not," and he just started walking in a straight line until he was literally dead on his feet. There's no telling how far he got, but surely not over a mile in his condition. Now, in my dream, Eric -- who, by the way, was one of the few people who lived or hung out at the Smith's house in those days who was really a Smith, so he had, of course, known Felix since Felix was a puppy -- Eric was building Felix a tomb. The tomb was an impressive structure as best I can recall, made of heavy stone blocks. It was somewhere, maybe at the Smiths or somewhere like the Smiths. Before he closed the tomb, Eric put into it a large number of things which he felt would be honoring to Felix in some way -- valuable things, some of them, and he put them in the tomb without regard to who owned them. Then he sealed the tomb so there was no way to open it! Well, I suspected that Eric had put something of mine -- I think it was a computer -- into the tomb, because I couldn't find it, and I got really angry at him. I was angry just as I had been angry at him in waking life the day he constructed a huge rat trap for the purpose of catching one of the rats that lived in the big excavation against the foundations at the back of the house. I didn't object to catching rats; I was very much in favor of that. But after building this monstrous rat trap, Eric armed it (without bait) and laid it down next to a counter in the kitchen/dining area where everyone came and went, often barefooted and certainly without looking out for toe breaking devices at their feet. I was chatting with Eric that afternoon in the kitchen and I happened to glance down at my feet -- bare feet, mind you -- and there was this thing, and as I looked at it I realized it was an enormous rat trap and that it was set to go off, and if I had stepped six inches to the left it would have smashed my foot. Eric got a sheepish grin on his face and I blew up... I was furious. Anyway, that's how I felt about the fact that Eric, in my dream, had sealed up all
kinds of important things, including my things, in Felix's tomb, and I was stomping around
the area looking for my computer and fuming about what Eric had done, when all of a sudden
the dream faded into a hazy background and a narrator cut in. Now, I don't normally have a
narrator in my dreams, and I didn't know there was one in this dream until right at the
end when he spoke. It was the calm voice of a man just concluding a story. He said,
"And it became a saying among them, whenever anyone couldn't find something: 'It's
probably in Felix's Tomb.'" Send someone a link to this page? |
